Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘essay’

Essays |

Ron Currie, Jr., Reads: Postcard from Portland, Maine

Spring is wet in Maine. The rivers swell and roadways succumb. Driveways turn to mud pits and basements flood. We take it all in stride, because living here is worth such minor irritations.

But this past spring, the rain seemed ceaseless. The normally bearable soggy months stretched into June and stole the beginning of summer from us. So, expecting Mainers to sit inside a bookstore on the first clear, balmy evening in early July seemed like too much to ask. Even the author Ron Currie, Jr., a Maine native himself, seemed hesitant to go inside Portland’s Longfellow Books for a reading and signing of his new novel Everything Matters! (Viking, 2009).


Essays |

Novel Dishes: The Time Traveler's Wife V: Henry's 43rd Birthday Feast

by Kathryn McGowan

Henry: Lourdes brings small plates of exquisitely arranged antipasti: transparent prosciutto with pale yellow melon, mussels that are mild and smoky, slender strips of carrot and beet that taste of fennel and olive oil. We eat Nell’s beautiful rare tuna, braised with a sauce of tomatoes, apples and basil. We eat small salads full of radicchio and orange peppers and we eat little brown olives that remind me of a meal I ate with my mother in a hotel in Athens when I was very young. We drink Sauvignon Blanc, toasting each other repeatedly. (“To olives!” “To baby-sitters!” “To Nell!”). Nell emerges from the kitchen carrying a small flat white cake that blazes with candles. Clare, Nell, and Lourdes sing “Happy Birthday” to me. I made a wish and blow out all the candles in one breath. “That means you’ll get your wish,” says Nell, but mine is not a wish that can be granted.


Essays |

Novel Dishes: The Time Traveler's Wife IV: Recipes for Respite: Kimy's Sangria, Duck Breasts with Raspberry and Pink Peppercorn Sauce, and Almond Torte

by Kathryn McGowan

Clare: “But don’t you think that it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”

Richard DeTamble: “I’ve often wondered about that. Do you believe that?

Clare: “Yes, I do.”


Essays |

Hobbling Up The Magic Mountain

by Sarah Van Arsdale

I just read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The whole thing. Starting on page one and ending on page 706. The events in the book span seven years, and reading it seemed to take almost as long. When I embarked on this project, I was recovering from orthopedic surgery … Why, then, would I want to read a lengthy book packed with intellectual digressions set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps prior to the start of World War II? Hadn’t I been through enough? How about something light, or at least short? A Carol Goodman murder mystery, or something by Nick Hornby? As it turned out, The Magic Mountain was a choice so perfect I’m thinking a copy should be handed out with every pre-admission packet given to surgical patients…


Essays |

Novel Dishes:The Time Traveler's Wife I: Introductions and Helen's (Fictional) Pear Bellini

by Kathryn McGowan

According to Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, cooking is one of the things that makes us human. I would argue another important thing on that list is storytelling. Perhaps this is why good stories so often involve food.

Today is the debut of Novel Dishes, a new occasional series on Fiction Writers Review.


Essays |

Quotes & Notes: Writing What's Yours, When It's Yours to Write

by Steven Wingate

“You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Consider Hurston’s words in the context of note-taking and revision, which we normally don’t think of as particularly inspired phases of the fiction process. Preparing the canvas can be a long and dreadful bore; we learn about our characters in slow motion, wanting to write the work itself but knowing that we aren’t yet ready. We synopsize, sometimes outline, sometimes take copious notes that we then ignore completely.


Essays |

The Copernican Author: On Point of View, Ptolemaic Characters, and Useful Unknowing

by Michael Byers

Ptolemy was trying to describe a system that didn’t exist. His point of view, literally, was wrong. He wasn’t looking at the planets from a fixed center, but from a body that was itself circling the sun. Copernicus’ eventual understanding of this fact led swiftly to the discovery of several other beautiful truths, including those of Kepler, Brahe, and Newton – suggesting that where you stand has everything to do with what you can see. And that if you’re standing in the wrong place, or facing the wrong direction, you’re going to see a very strange, distorted view.

All of which is to say, point of view matters. It might be proposed that an author does well to be relatively Copernican, even if his characters start out almost entirely Ptolemaic. … The supreme example of a character remaining Ptolemaic within a Copernican story is Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog”. In this story, Chekhov knows nearly everything, and Anna knows, perhaps, only a little less – while the point of view character Gurov knows almost nothing of what goes on around him.




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